Apes Playing Straight Dramatic Roles

Monkeys, chimps, orangutans and other simians almost always are played for laughs in movies and television, going back to Tarzan`s Cheetah.

King Kong, Godzilla and other supersized mechanical gorillas or men in ape suits have been used to terrify audiences.

There has been little use of anthropoids as creatures in straight roles in dramatic pictures.

But in Link -- as in missing link -- a threesome of apes (two chimps and an orangutan) are to be taken seriously as antagonists in a suspense thriller in which the apes take over a scientific project.

The difference between the simians in Link and other films featuring anthropoids is that these creatures are invested with more than humorous or violent behavior for purposes of plot.

The animals in Link are the real thing, a choice made by director Richard Franklin who should have advised George Lucas to use a genuine duck in Howard The Duck, wherein a midget in a duck suit destroyed any hint of credulity.

``No man in a costume can play a chimpanzee or orangutan,`` Franklin said the other day. ``The animals are smaller than men. They tried to pull it off in Greystoke with state-of-the-art men in ape suits, but it wasn`t all that convincing.

``I had ape suits run up for Link in case our animals didn`t work out. It would have been easier to make the film with men in costume, but the challenge of working with apes fascinated me.``

Franklin`s story involves a scientist experimenting with producing a superape through subliminal learning techniques to a point where the ape can almost pass for human.

Franklin is a native of Australia who attended the University of Southern California cinema school. He made his directorial debut with The True Story of Eskimo Nell in 1975, followed by Patrick, an acclaimed thriller. His Hollywood film debut was with Psycho II, which he followed with Cloak and Dagger.

Before embarking on Link, Franklin hired animal trainer Ray Berwick who provided him with the three apes who would work with co-stars Terrence Stamp and Elisabeth Shue. The entire picture was filmed in England.

``Apes can be difficult and dangerous to work with in films,`` Franklin acknowledged. ``They are eight times as strong as human beings and given to passionate mood swings.

``We had no accidents and no one was hurt. The apes were well-trained. Adult chimps are not childlike or as intelligent as a lot of people think. I needed them to look in specific directions on camera and to use a limited number of facial expressions.

``I would photograph them and then cut to other action, allowing the audience to interpret what they saw. The trick is to let human emotions take over and imagine what the animals are doing.

``Berwick did a good job of seeing that they hit their marks and didn`t go wandering off during a scene. Even so, we had to lay out every shot in advance like a comic strip. I made 1,600 camera setups, more than twice the number I use in films with strictly human actors.

``It`s possible to get the apes almost to act. It`s impossible to get them to think the right thoughts, but you can get them interested in the action.

``Like kids, they have short attention spans. I`d rehearse a scene with the chimps and their trainers until they knew what was expected. Then I`d bring in Elisabeth Shue for the shot and they would be fascinated to see a young woman doing what their trainers had done in rehearsal. It was that look of interest I wanted to capture.

``This isn`t a gimmick picture where the apes are made to look as if they`re speaking a human language. I had to fall back on silent film techniques in many scenes. I had to tell much of the story through editing and montage.

``I hired Jerry Goldsmith to write the score, which is terribly important to a film without a lot of dialogue. The music fills in for dialogue, expressing Link`s thoughts and moods.

``Before Jerry wrote the music I took him to the London zoo to watch the behavior of apes so he would capture the necessary musical attitudes.

``What I wanted to do was present the apes for what they are and what their learning possibilities are, all in the form of a suspenseful story dismissing the missing link theory.``